Comments | jimkeller: One Late-Start Author’s Journey

jimkeller

One Late-Start Author’s Journey

Mar 02, 2015 16:29

Originally published at ipse illum dicto. You can comment here or there.

Well, Ryan Boudinot’s piece in The Stranger continues to prompt discussion, which I suppose means that it’s doing its job. And my own assertion that there’s nothing impeding authors who don’t take writing seriously as teenagers from succeeding is, shall we say, not meeting with ( Read more... )

writing

Comments 12

Something's wrong jsadler March 3 2015, 01:00:51 UTC

Tried to expand but there's nothing there.

Re: Something's wrong jsadler March 3 2015, 01:01:22 UTC

But now there is - very odd.

ann_leckie March 3 2015, 15:12:41 UTC

Dude, The Great Gatsby is totally worth reading. I suspect Mr Former MFA Prof was shocked and appalled because at one time pretty much everybody was assigned TGG at some point in high school. I suspect it's falling out of fashion, though--my daughter hasn't had it assigned, so far as I know, in her entire HS career ( ... )

stupid length restriction! ann_leckie March 3 2015, 15:13:06 UTC

I do agree that someone who hasn't read a lot probably isn't going to write terribly well. But that's "probably." Maybe even "very probably." Still, there it is. I don't actually think that, say, heavy consumption and analysis of non-literary storytelling forms is going to help here--being familiar with particular forms is, IMO, a big part of later being able to work with and manipulate those forms. It's not just "how narrative works" that you need to learn, but how various forms of literature are constructed. I suspect this is why I could never get the stupid ass five paragraph essay thing down--I never read the damn things. Who the hell ever did? Nobody--even the examples the teachers gave us--there was a whole textbook full of essays in high school, some of them quite famous and good reading--not one of them was in five paragraph format. Because nobody uses the damn thing except comp teachers! But damn if I couldn't whip out a fake newspaper article or a pastiche of a Sherlock Holmes story ( ... )

nihilistic_kid March 3 2015, 16:22:18 UTC

Yes, Gatsby is still widely assigned in schools. If it was going out of fashion a few years ago, the film brought it back into vogue. Nothing's easier than pairing a book with a recent movie ( ... )

ann_leckie March 3 2015, 18:28:13 UTC

Well, yeah. I didn't address that part much, and I might have. I admit I was a bit taken aback at the student seeming to think Gatsby was difficult reading. When I first encountered it in high school, I happily swallowed it down in a few hours. I can totally see someone not having read it, for whatever reason. I'm less sympathetic to finding it particularly hard work to read.

Thread 8

nihilistic_kid March 3 2015, 16:57:03 UTC

Are you enjoying enough success that someone else looks up to you as someone who “made it”?

Sure. Even when I wrote my Psychology Today piece on failure, many people were surprised. I got a number of "I wish I had your life" responses, people expressing confidence that if they had published 100 short stories, or won an award, or had a movie, or got into Best American, they'd be happy and consider themselves a success, etc. But clearly what Boudinot means is publication at a certain level-there is no other reason to take a low-res MFA program: it's not good for teaching, and an MA is easier if you just need an advanced degree to get a raise at work.

You sound more committed to writing as a teen than I was. I wrote a couple of stories, even submitted one to Granta, and read and re-read books and comic books and RPG manuals, but never thought to pick up Writer's Digest or enter a correspondence course. (I didn't even have a computer until my second semester of college anyway, and no money, and had too many responsibilities to carry on ( ... )

jimkeller March 8 2015, 04:23:28 UTC

A friend of mine who, unlike me, made it to AWP last year came back with a report that Ursula K. Le Guin reports feeling like she hasn't "made it" yet (and that she's not a fan of workshopping, which sent shock waves through the MFA program) because, awards and commercial success aside, she still feels like she's struggling to improve her craft. It makes me wonder if the nature of the business is that the author's perception of their level of success will always be at odds with an outsider's perspective.